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Where it all started, the first watch.

Where it all started, the first watch.

    The history of watches began in 16th-century Europe, where watches evolved from portable spring-driven clocks, which first appeared in the 15th century.

    A 16th-century portable drum watch with sundial. The 24-hour dial has Roman numerals on the outer band and Hindu-Arabic numerals on the inner one

    One account of the origin of the word "watch" suggests that it came from the Old English word ‘woecce’ which meant "watchman", because town watchmen used watches to keep track of their shifts. Another theory surmises that the term came from 17th-century sailors, who used the new mechanisms to time the length of their shipboard watches (duty shifts).

    The first timepieces to be worn, made in the 16th century beginning in the German cities of Nuremberg and Augsburg, were transitional in size between clocks and watches. Portable timepieces were made possible by the invention of the mainspring in the early 15th century. Nuremberg clockmaker Peter Henlein (or Henle or Hele) (1485-1542) is often credited as the inventor of the watch. He was one of the first German craftsmen who made "clock-watches", ornamental timepieces worn as pendants, which were the first timepieces to be worn on the body.

    An early watch from around 1505 purportedly by Peter Henlein

    Styles changed in the 17th century and men began to wear watches in pockets instead of as pendants (the woman's watch remained a pendant into the 20th century). To fit in pockets, their shape evolved into the typical pocket watch shape, rounded and flattened with no sharp edges. Glass was used to cover the face beginning around 1610.

    A great leap forward in accuracy occurred in 1657 with the addition of the balance spring to the balance wheel, an invention disputed both at the time and ever since between Robert Hooke and Christiaan Huygens. This increased watches' accuracy enormously, reducing error from perhaps several hours per day to perhaps 10 minutes per day, resulting in the addition of the minute hand to the face from around 1680 in Britain and 1700 in France.

    Drawing of one of his first balance springs, attached to a balance wheel, by Christiaan Huygens, published in his letter in the Journal des Sçavants of 25 February 1675

    From the beginning, wristwatches were almost exclusively worn by women, while men used pocket watches up until the early 20th century. The concept of the wristwatch goes back to the production of the very earliest watches in the 16th century. Some people say the world's first wristwatch was created by Abraham-Louis Breguet for Caroline Murat, Queen of Naples, in 1810. However, Elizabeth I of England received a wristwatch from Robert Dudley in 1571, described as an arm watch, 229 years earlier than the 1810 Abraham-Louis Breguet. Wristwatches were first worn by military men towards the end of the nineteenth century, when the importance of synchronizing maneuvers during war without potentially revealing the plan to the enemy through signaling was increasingly recognized.

    The first quartz watches to enter production was the Seiko 35 SQ Astron, which hit the shelves on 25 December 1969, which was the world's most accurate wristwatch to date. Since the technology having been developed by contributions from Japanese, American and Swiss, nobody could patent the whole movement of the quartz wristwatch, thus allowing other manufacturers to participate in the rapid growth and development of the quartz watch market, This ended — in less than a decade — almost 100 years of dominance by the mechanical wristwatch legacy.

A mechanical watch movement

    In 2010, Miyota (Citizen Watch) of Japan introduced a newly developed movement that uses a new type of quartz crystal with ultra-high frequency (262.144 kHz) which is claimed to be accurate to +/- 10 seconds a year, and has a smooth sweeping second hand rather than one that jumps.

 

    The first watch from redear is Chronos which exatcly use the Miyota movement from Japan,and in order to offer the customers with best feeling when they using the watch.Everything we do is trying to let you feel 100 satisfied when you are receiving our products,and what is more to give you the extra surprise.

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